Christopher Cerf

Christopher D. Cerf (born ) is an American education administrator and attorney who previously served as the state-appointed Superintendent of the Newark Public Schools in New Jersey. Early life Cerf was born in Illinois but grew up in Washington, D.C. Around 1970, he and his family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, where he attended Commonwealth School. He earned his undergraduate degree in history from Amherst College in 1977. He later graduated from Columbia Law School where in his final year he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review. While at Columbia, Cerf had also spent his first summer working at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and his second summer at a Wall Street law firm. Career For four years before law school, Cerf taught history at Cincinnati Country Day School, a private high school in Cincinnati, Ohio. After graduating from Columbia Law School, Cerf served as a clerk to J. Skelly Wright, a judge in Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In 1985, Cerf became a clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. As a clerk, former Justice O'Connor later described Cerf as "a hard worker, a sensible worker, and he was just excellent. You can't find any fault with him." He later served on the advisory board of iCivics, an education non-profit founded by O'Connor. After his clerkships, Cerf worked as a lawyer in two law firms in Washington, D.C., a period in which he returned to the Supreme Court to argue two cases, one of which he won. One of two Washington firms Cerf worked for was Onek, Klein & Farr. Many years later, Joel Klein, a partner at the firm, would appoint Cerf as his deputy in the New York City Department of Education. Cerf later joined Bill Clinton's first campaign for President of the United States. And after the campaign, from 1993 to 1996, Cerf was associate counsel to President Clinton. In that capacity, he worked on tobacco regulation and efforts to protect prisoner's rights to petition for habeas corpus.